156 COUNTRY ESSAYS. 



stition. The same distrust and diffidence may be seen in the 

 feeling of the ancient Greeks towards the Eumenides and the 

 Mysteries, and it is instictively rooted in human nature. The 

 first night on which Roderick carried our fish from Loch Bean- 

 noch he was impenetrable to any questioning. Though an 

 excellent fisherman, he is the exact type of a seer, with his 

 reverent old-world beliefs and somewhat dreamy eye. Scott 

 might have drawn his Allan Bane from him, 



" A grey-haired sire, whose eye, intent, 

 Was on the visioned future bent." 



But in the steady drizzle he replied with an amazed negative to 

 all our inquiries whether he knew no story of witches and war- 

 locks, whose cantrips might beguile the way, Spaewives and 

 women who will send favourable wind, Thomas the Rhymer or 

 Merlin, Tamlane and the Fairy Queen had he never heard of 

 them? "'Deed, no, sir; I did never hear tell of them," and 

 he looked at us with a serious look, as if he expected we were 

 not altogether "canny." In despair, we told him of village 

 queans turning into mawkins (hares), and vice versa, of profes- 

 sors of witchcraft we had known, of pentagons and horoscopes, 

 and all the commonplaces of the wizard's art. He only listened 

 in awestruck silence. But he became more at home when we 

 related how we had once met a veritable witch on Tweedside, 

 evidently proved to be such because she was walking without 

 being wet through a violent thunder-shower ; and how, next 

 day, a terrified hare ran under the wheels of the carriage in 

 which we drove hard by, and was killed. It was easy to con- 

 nect the two occurrences, and a much slighter coincidence in old 

 days would have sufficed to condemn the poor beldame. When 

 Roderick found out, however, that we were to be trusted, a 

 night or two afterwards hs treated to a choice display of witch- 

 craft, and spoke with amusing force and evident conviction, 

 the charm of which we dispair of conveying to our readers. 

 He began by instancing the witch of Endor (being, like all 



